Description: This book pursues a comprehensive reading of T. S. Eliot's poetry as it engages with Earth. Finding that such engagement is pervasive in the poet's oeuvre, the book offers a new perspective to critics intrigued by Eliot's project, the modern poetic enterprise, ecocritical deve...
Review Quotes:
"In this groundbreaking study of T. S. Eliot's work, Terblanche draws on ecocriticism and Buddhism to argue that the poet had a profound relationship with the earth, defined as a system of material and aesthetic realities in which humans are entangled and interconnected. His readings of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ' The Waste Land, and Four Quartets demonstrate Eliot's awareness of Becoming and his belief in keeping time with the changes of our lives. Building on the insights of 'new materialism, ' he convincingly supports Eliot's belief in poetry as embodiment. In this fine study, Terblanche both extends and interrogates previous criticism on the twentieth-century's premier poet." --Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita, Eckerd College
"Etienne Terblanche shows us how Eliot's poetry, antennae-like, reaches ahead, already anticipating the fallout of the Anthropocene and the dry sterility and dislocation of infinite semiosis. The response? Poet and poet-scholar co-create a poetics of immersion. We follow algae, jellyfish, sea anemones, hippopotamuses, porpoises--even the failure of Prufrock's 'ragged claws'--into a streetless expanse of originary, vibrant, and agentic Earth. In short, the book dares to affirm." --Aaron M. Moe, author of Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry "This is a timely and ambitious exploration of the significance of nature to the life and work of T. S. Eliot. In its examination of the centrality of the Earth to the poet it makes an important contribution to the continuing extension of ecocriticism and suggests new ways of reading Eliot's work that recognize the breadth and complexity of modern relationships to place." --Elizabeth Harris, Manchester Metropolitan University